Creek Running North

Look atop that pine up the hill: a red-shouldered hawk calls again and again, a bad seagull imitation attracting the nesting mockingbirds. Mockers are territorial when reproducing, aggressively so. They mob the young hawk, perturbing him slightly, and making one hell of a racket. Bothered by the fuss, a male Anna’s hummingbird starts chittering, strafing the mockingbirds as they in turn strafe the raptor. Eventually the hawk retreats, still cawing.

When we think about relationships among organisms at all, which is seldom enough, our thoughts tend toward the dyadic. Puma interacts with deer, by eating it. Male wolf challenges other male wolf. Aphid sinks drilling rig into Brussels sprout plant.  The notion that such relationships might be strongly influenced by a third organism, or a fourth or fifth one, is conceded and then swiftly forgotten.

This pairing of animals two by two serves the analytic mind well in its simplicity, but there are some interactions that defy such reduction.

Each morning I awake, turn on the coffee machine, then open the door to let Zeke and Thistle out to romp in the fenced backyard. I shower, check email, then spend some time with the animals in the garden before rounding them up and leaving for work.

It’s a slightly risky practice, leaving the rabbit out there all alone. Our neighborhood has its share of predators large enough to eat a small rabbit — barn owl, raccoons, feral cats and loose dogs. The white-tailed kites that daily pass over our yard are too small to carry away anything larger than a mouse, but there are red-shouldered hawks, and red-tails and sharp-shins, that could make relatively quick work of a rabbit Thistle’s size. So we don’t leave him out there alone for long, and we put Zeke out there with him, and we provide lots of hiding places — pots on their sides and the like.

A couple weeks ago I was making a third espresso when I heard a rasping scream from the yard. It took three hurried steps toward the door before I realized what I’d heard was not the agonized sound of a rabbit in extremis: it was something rawer, less piercing.

I burst through the door. Thistle, unharmed, was just diving beneath an Adirondack chair. Directly above, not four feet from my head, was that red-shouldered hawk. Talons extended, juvenile bars flashing on the underside of its tail, it wanted Thistle.

Zeke, it turned out, was no help at all. He is an old dog, thirteen and affable and slow, and animated mainly when playing tag with the rabbit. If the pretty bird wanted to join in the fun, who was Zeke to interfere?

As it happened, Thistle was saved by help from an unexpected quarter. Also above my head, countering the hawk move for move and darting just out of reach of its talons, was a crow. It had made the scream I’d heard from the kitchen: a raucous rebel yell of somewhat sadistic glee. He had been hanging around for days, watching Zeke from the oak with apparent fascination. Dog-watching that morning, the crow was on hand to harass the red-shoulder, saving Thistle from an agonizing, perhaps drawn out death.

How to reduce that interaction to its component pairs of animals? Take out any one player and the story ends very differently. Dissect the story into dyads and there is no story.

Except for this: the hawk took off. Thistle gladly accepted the shelter of his cage, stopped shivering, and started eating his morning carrot. Zeke wandered into the bedroom and dozed.

And I went back outside, to where the crow could see me from the perch to which it had withdrawn, atop the oak. It looked at me, let loose a few more of those cries that had made me drop my coffee.

It was just him and me now.

“Anything from this garden,” I said. “Anything you want, it’s yours. Bring your family.” The crow cawed twice more, fell silent for a moment, flew off.